Conscientious in 2012

If there’s one thing I learned it is that it’s impossible to predict which articles on this site will be widely read and which ones won’t. In particular, there is no correlation between the articles I like the most and the ones that end up being popular. At times, I find that slightly hard to deal with, even though I am usually very good at reminding myself that such is life. With that in mind I decided to look back and to highlight my own personal favourite articles this past year (regardless of how widely read they were).

We’re still caught in a sheer endless loop of writing about Instagram. With Instagram now used in the (US) news media, I talked about the crucial role of context in One size does not fit all: Context matters greatly, explaining why I don’t think Instagram has a proper place in a news context. In Hipstamatic and a question for news organizations I asked: “Dear news organizations (New York Times, Time, Newsweek, et al.), is publishing such heavily manipulated images compatible with your journalistic ethics, standards, and integrity? If, yes why? If no, why not? In particular, if yes why is such heavy-handed manipulation allowed, but when someone heavily Photoshops an image (let’s say to boost the contrast in massive ways) that’s not allowed?” The number of responses I received: Zero.

It would be somewhat interesting to investigate whether the explosion of photography on the internet, on sites like Facebook etc., does not show that many of the ideas of postmodernism are if not flawed then at least only partly useful. To be honest, I find discussions about Roland Barthes and any of the other usual suspects more than just a bit tedious, so I ignored them completely in The Artist, the (possibly) Genius.